Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/100

 86 CEITICAL NOTICES : obscures the essential disparateness of mental facts and nervous changes which Spencer elsewhere explicitly acknowledges; and by suggesting " that the manner of connexion between the two so- called 'faces' is manifest and their separation inconceivable," it takes an insensible step towards materialism. The fact of con- comitance being admitted, the crucial point in debate is whether the causal nexus is to be conceived as lying wholly on the phys- ical side. Sidgwick does not himself discuss this question but he points out that it is a question which neither Psychology nor Physiology, nor both together, can solve. It belongs to Philosophy to decide it or at least to muster the considerations which make for the one side or the other. The empirical psychologist may therefore leave the controversy on one side. It is this first relation of mind to matter which gives to Material- ism any support or plausibility which it possesses ; Idealism or, as Sidgwick proposes to call it, Mentalism arises in connexion with the second or cognitive relation of mind to its object. Mentalists (with whom may be classed Phenomenalists or Kelativists) analyse matter as an object of perception into purely mental elements, either of the nature of feeling (Sensationalists) or of the nature of thought (Idealists of the type of Green). As against all these, Sidgwick announces his own metaphysical standpoint to be "speaking broadly that of what has been called since Keid the Philosophy of Common Sense or Natural Dualism " (p. 42). He warns us against supposing that he means in a few pages to discuss and decide this issue, but he argues that the question is one for metaphysics to determine and that empirical psychology does not decide it in favour of mentalism, as it is sometimes supposed to do. ' Reflective analysis ' resolves our cognition of matter into secondary qualities and relational qualities of extension and incompressibility ; ' psychogonical analysis,' in the hands of Eelativists and Sensa- tionalists, traces back this combination of percepts and concepts to association of sensational elements. But even should this ' conjectural history ' be true, the conclusion drawn by the Sensa- tionalist involves "a fundamental confusion between antecedents and elements ". It has moreover to be observed that, while denying the extra-mental existence of matter in one relation, his own account of sensation usually assumes that existence in another relation as the physiological basis of the mental facts he is describing. The two lectures which follow on ' The Scope of Metaphysics ' begin by repudiating the dyslogistic application of the term which would make it equivalent to ' inquiries which experience has shown to be futile'. 'That is not my view,' says Sidgwick bravely, ' I think that the questions, which according to the traditional meaning of the word it is convenient to distinguish as metaphysical, are, in part at least, questions to which as rational beings we are bound to seek some kind of answer ; though we may have to content ourselves with a very imperfect and provisional